Structuring the Smartphone Industry: Is the Mobile Internet OS Platform the Key?

With the launch of the original iPhone, Apple redefined the “smartphone” product category and accelerated the convergence of traditional mobile telephony, Internet services, and personal computing into a new industry. As these sectors merge into a single device, formerly separate industry architectures and their constituent firms are being forced into direct competition. We test theories of industry architecture and technological platforms regarding their ability to explain the strategies of key entrants in navigating the transition. We analyze in detail the actions and strategies of four major competitors, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, and, more briefly, Research in Motion and HP/Palm, from the framework of technological platform theory. Our analysis suggests that currently some competitors are following traditional platform strategies, but that Google and Apple appear to have adopted strategies at odds with platform literature. We examine how the dynamics of this convergence may lead to a reconsideration of certain tenets of platform theory.     

Investitionen in Next-Generation-Access-Netze: Zugangsverträge und Regulierung

Die Netzstrukturen im Bereich der Telekommunikation entwickeln sich weiter und erfordern neue Investitionen. Die notwendige Regulierung kann dabei verschiedene Formen annehmen und zu unterschiedlichen Zeitpunkten ansetzen. Die Autoren beschreiben die Netzinfrastruktur in Deutschland und zeigen die Ergebnisse der Regulierungsvarianten auf.     

Efficiency and total factor productivity in Ukrainian agriculture in transition

This article analyzes efficiency and total factor productivity (TFP) change of large agricultural enterprises during their transition to a market economy in Ukraine. Efficiency is calculated by Data Envelopment Analysis and productivity change is measured by the Malmquist Productivity Change Index in the period between 1990 and 1999. On average, TFP declined by 6% annually, dropping a total 42%. The main reason for the observed TFP decline is a decrease in technical efficiency, which is found to be remarkably significant. At the same time there is a high variation among individual enterprises: the distribution of efficiency scores widens, which indicates that the farms diverge with respect to their economic performance. A Tobit regression analysis is conducted in which efficiency scores are related to factors such as farm type, farm size, initial conditions, and legal form.     

Do Bond Covenants Affect Borrowing Costs?

High yield bond investors spend a great deal of time studying covenants. They even hire specialized consultants to help them interpret the dense language of indentures. But for all that, does a company's decision to offer strong rather than weak covenants—or to offer covenants at all—have a measurable impact on its borrowing costs? There is surprisingly little evidence that variation in credit risk premiums reflects the presence or absence of covenants. Taking advantage of a newly available kind of data—Moody's Investors Service's Covenant Quality (CQ) ratings, which were initiated in 2011—the authors studied each newly issued U.S. high yield bond beginning in 2011 using Moody's CQ ratings, where a rating of “1” represents the strongest covenant rating and “5” the weakest. The authors hypothesize that if investors are willing to pay for covenant protection, bonds with weak CQ scores should have spreads that are higher, on average, than the medians of the bonds in their rating group. What they found, however, was that even bonds rated CQ5, indicating negligible protection, had spreads that were only 9.54 basis points higher than the median of companies with the same credit rating. The authors also found, contrary to their initial supposition, that higher yields were associated with stronger covenants, suggesting that investors demand more protection on issues they view as having greater credit risk than other equivalently rated issues.     

High food commodity prices: will they stay? who will pay?

Much of the public discussion of the food price crisis has focused on the sharply increased use of food commodities for biofuel production, framing debate in simple food versus fuel terms. Reality is more complex. Multiple forces drove food prices to high levels and, according to findings we report in this article, these forces will sustain high prices over the medium term. We also find that the distinction between high world prices for food commodities and the consumer costs of food is an important one to make. Food consumers do not buy raw food commodities at international prices. The degree to which the price of traded food commodities and the price of food are related depends on a long list of factors, most of which operate to dampen price transmission. In the search for appropriate policy response, it is essential to measure consumer effects correctly and to apportion properly the causes of current high prices.     

Internalising the costs of fragmentation and nutrient deposition in spatial planning: Extending a decision support tool for the Netherlands

The Land Use Scanner (LUS) is a decision support system for land use planning that is widely used in the Netherlands. The model yields solutions that have a high resolution (500×500 m) and reflect economic equilibrium in the land market, in which eighteen types of land use and nine aggregated habitat types competitively bid for locations. Here, an extension to the LUS is presented that enables the internalisation of environmental externalities. The focus in this study is on two important externalities, namely ammonia emissions from agriculture and habitat fragmentation. We simulate four IPCC-based land use scenarios and assess the level of fragmentation of the nine habitat types. We also perform sensitivity analyses in the most market-oriented scenario on the effectiveness of market-based instruments in promoting more efficient land allocation. The simulation results suggest that particularly the habitat type ‘rain-fed mires and bogs’ is susceptible to fragmentation. The sensitivity analyses show that internalising the damage costs of fragmentation resulted in smaller changes in land allocation than internalising those of nitrogen deposition. For both instruments, the policy effort was large in relation to the efficiency gains in land allocation.     

Optimal location of new forests in a suburban region

This paper looks at the optimal location of new forests in a suburban region under area constraints. The methodology takes into account use benefits, non-use benefits (both bequest and existence values), opportunity costs of converting agricultural land, as well as planting and management costs of the new forest. The recreational benefits of new forest sites are estimated using function transfer techniques. We show that the net social benefit of the total afforestation project varies up to a factor 6. The recreational value of a site varies considerably with the available substitutes.     

Ethics and behavior on the Russian commodity exchange

With tumultuous changes occurring in the former Soviet Union, a unique opportunity exists to examine the implications of unethical behavior in what is,de facto, a totally unregulated market. Recent legalization of commodity trading in Moscow carried with it no legal structure to ensure swift compliance with contract terms. This paper demonstrates that in the absence of legal remedies, a free marketplace appropriately punishes unethical conduct.Michael A. Kolosov. Educated in engineering, Mr. Kolosov has published several articles in numerous trade and technical journals throughout the former Soviet Union. Currently, Mr. Kolosov is a floor trader for the Forum Brokerage Company on the Russian Commodity Exchange in Moscow.Deryl W. Martin. Dr. Martin has presented his research at several regional and national conferences, and has previously published in theJournal of Economics and Business, theJournal of Financial and Strategic Decisions, theJournal of Business and Economic Perspectives, and theJournal of Business Ethics. He is currently Assistant Professor of Finance at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN.Jeffrey H. Peterson. Dr. Peterson also has presented several papers at regional and national meetings and has published in theNew York State Economic Review and theJournal of Business Ethics. He is currently Assistant Professor of Finance at Saint Bonaventure University in Saint Bonaventure, NY.Direct knowledge of the first author is the primary source of information for this article. Though figures quoted in this paper were accurate when written, we regret that the rate of change in Commonwealth society outpaces our ability to relate timely market data.